Funz and failz in DDO

It’s nice to get some time to sit back and work on a blog post. The last couple of weeks have been pretty full of stuff both real-life and DDO – dentist visits, escaped cats, leveling Dissy and getting OurDDO going, for starters. So while I’ve got plenty of IDEAS for blog posts swimming ’round my head, I just haven’t had the time to actually do anything about them. It’s probably a bit late for the April Fools’ Day post I had planned, complete with screenshots of my new Invisible Stalker pet. And if it’s past due for April Fools, the remaining saga of March Madness is way late as well, but I WILL be finishing that. Soon. I hope. Maybe.

Anyway, my dental work is now complete – YAY! And I was rewarded with Reese’s peanut butter cups (maybe a silly choice for someone who just had a lot of major stuff done to her teeth, but TOTALLY worth it), nail polish, and the latest issue of “Math Puzzles and Logic Problems,” which was doubly cool because 1) I hadn’t seen it in ages and wasn’t even sure it was still around, and 2) This issue’s cover is CHARTREUSE!

With everything going on, besides not writing anything on my OWN blog, I’m way behind on pretty much everybody else’s too. I’ve tried to skim through here and there but mostly I’m feeling very out of the loop. I still need to send Baz the screenies I got of him in his new armor kit, and I’ve owed Keava an E-mail or two or three as well.

just call her sherman

‘Cause she’s a tank. Based on something Samius commented on one of my older posts, I decided to see if Even could dual-tank Horoth and Sully at the same time. Yeah, yeah, I know, you don’t even need a tank for ToD if you’re superduperuber – well, Even is NOT uber in any way, shape or form. So what’s trifling to uber folks is rather a big deal to her… especially because not only did she tank them both successfully, holding aggro while taking very little damage, that run also marked her first official stab at tanking shadows. That’s always intimidated me mostly because I’ve seen some damn good parties wipe when just one or two shadows made it up onto the platform.

No worries, though; a shiny new GS cold stick, a stack of fire shield scrolls, a solid fog clicky, and Even cruised. From the start of the quest to the end, I don’t think she used more than maybe five or six Lay On Hands, and really didn’t need any additional healing even though one of the healers kept cures on her every time she got under a thousand HP – but hey, I’ll take a little overhealing over underhealing ANY day.

And speaking of healing, I got Jall for Baz’s 20th ToD, which was HIS first time tanking shadows – I was all ready to keep him healed up, but he never needed it at all. VERY nice work. :)

I did have to laugh the other night, though – I was on Dissy running the Web of Chaos chain with Vey (OK, Vey was pretty much dragging Dissy’s gimpy li’l butt through). Vey had LFMed to fill the last couple of spots. At one point Vey called me “Even.” No big deal; no matter which toon I’m on, most people who know me call me Even. But one guy goes, “Even? As in Evennote? The uber pally?” I thought at first he was being sarcastic or something, but turns out he was in the party when Even soloed Harry in elite Shroud. That may be her finest moment, but I still cracked up hearing someone call her “uber.”

ourDDO takes off

I might have neglected some other stuff, but AFAIK everyone who’s asked to be added to OurDDO is on there, and I think I got all but MAYBE one within 24 hours (and that wasn’t even the one who is apparently ticked that I didn’t get them sooner). I’m calling that a good start, but I’m definitely looking at ways to make it better. I’d like to spiffy it up and do a lot more customizing. The trouble is, free sites to consolidate feeds don’t give you a lot of options. It was hard just to find one that didn’t limit me to only three or five feeds.

There’s also a big difference in what you see depending on what browser you’re using. I mostly use Chrome, which has serious issues with feeds. Safari gives me a much nicer display with some options in a sidebar. If you’re having trouble viewing the feed, try searching for “RSS feed reader” along with your preferred browser name. Anyway, the options I’m mulling over are:

Pay to upgrade this WordPress account to give me more customization options (pro accounts have access to plug-ins that can handle RSS feeds elegantly, but I’m definitely not thrilled about the prospect of spending real money on this)

Make a new page and update everything manually, which would be a CRAPTON of work and make it impossible to get instant updates

Port it over to my existing site and host it there

Option 3 is kind of looking like the way to go, and if I do that, I’ll probably move the whole blog over as well, but I have to decide if I really want anybody and everybody from DDO having the address of my personal site. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’d be no big deal. It’s the 1% that scares me – my blog’s linked in my profile on all my toons; do I really want the guy standing next to me at the AH on my personal site? I s’pose I could just add a domain name, but there’s that real money thing again.

Point is, though, I AM going to find a way to make OurDDO easier to read and use. Also, if you’re not on the OurDDO feed and you want to be, let me know! I will NOT add anyone unless they specifically ask me to. Best way to reach me is via Gmail; my username is Evennote. And I’m making a serious effort to actually check mail there at least once a day instead of once every month or so like I WAS doing. :D

epic bard is epic

… and I’m talking about Dissy, so when I say “epic,” I mean “epicly gimped.” LOL But she IS now level 20, so she’s epic in that respect even though she’s still squishy as hell. She surprises me at times… the Shavarath wilderness is a painful grind with her. At level 18 (I banked 19 until she capped), a lot of her CC didn’t work overly well because those darn Amrath mobs have such high saves. Not to mention, she thinks “DPS” stands for “Drow, Pretty, Singer.”

And yet she did OK in Cannith Manufactury slayers even before I reset her enhancements to get Music of Makers. As level 20 got close, I decided to try a couple of the quests in there, starting with Schemes just because it’s the one I know best. Aside from me somehow getting lost (gee, imagine that), the only close calls she had were when the panther started the beeeeeg fight by attacking the door you’re not supposed to attack. THAT got hectic, but she used her bow to take out the cannons one at a time until they finally stopped respawning. After that, the end fight was cake, just kinda long and tedious.

I didn’t try Power Play with her yet – don’t know why, I’ve never really had trouble with that quest but I’ve never liked it – but after signing off Friday night with less than 50K to go for level 20, I scrapped my usual Saturday errands, got up early and took her into Blown to Bits. She had a lot of fun with that and even did the extreme challenge optional, then headed back to Amrath and s-l-o-w-l-y got the last four explorers she was missing along with a few more slayers to get her to… 400, I think.

If she’d remembered to get her deathblock necklace out of the bank, she’d have capped after running Acute Delirium later Saturday (after a few hours spent on, of all things, real life). Darn beholders… she ended up about 350 XP short of cap; I noticed she still needed a few Ataraxia explorers, headed there, got Mineshaft IV and the Mining Cave, and then the rare wildman was nice enough to be home, which capped her with a whopping 12 XP to spare. My little bard has grown up!

on drama

OK… I really, REALLY didn’t want to have to address this at all. And I appreciate the concern, I really do. But here’s the thing. I’m already aware that there are things being said behind my back. No one else needs to tell me about it. And no, I’m not going to address the issue.

If someone else wants to start drama, I can’t control that. All I can control is my own involvement. IMHO, the best way to deal with stuff like that is not to deal with it at all so as not to add fuel to the fire. As Mark Twain said, “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” My mouth’s not the one that’s open, so to paraphrase LOLcats, “All ur dramaz are belong 2 U.”

I’ll settle for Acanthia winning DDO with her shiny new Easy Button. For 25 points, I just couldn’t resist the urge to give this a try. It sure beat hearing anything more from anyone else about drama.

Now if only I had a “You Win Blogging” button, something I could just push… have it go through all of my old posts imported from MyDDO and update the colors and fonts and all that stuff that I really want to do but just haven’t had the time or ambition.